Sprite Lessons., By Medri Fogmatio

Too bad.

.::HOLY SURPRISE- Guest Appearance: Anti-Aliasing!::.
with permission from Mr. Medri Fogmatio

Have you ever noticed that your outlines, even when designed at the pixel level, look annoyingly blocky? Have a look at Commander Mailbox here:



Ol' Commander is pretty sweet and fairly well shaded--he's got a basic upper-right light source--however, he lacks that professional sexy lineart that makes famous spriters famous. What is this? Well, we in the business call it ANTI-ALIASING. Basically, anti-aliasing is adding midway pixels to the side of a pixelated line to help it blend in with whatever it's next to. Let's look at a simple curved line as an example:



This line is pretty good. It doesn't skip any beats as far as curves go, but hey! It's dull! It's boxy! It's monotone! You can see the little squares. So let's get to it! Basically, what you wanna do is create a color about halfway between the color of the line, and the color of the face. (For this line, it'll be grey; halfway between black and white. For a red block with a blue outline (hey, don't ask) the anti-alias would be purple. What you do with it is place a pixel at the "cliffs:" the little skips that using pixels makes. It's like filling in a gap between bricks with some mortar. Here's a huge blocky thing for demonstrative purposes:



See how it uses the AA VERY SPARINGLY. If you do this wrong, it WILL turn into pillow shading and you WILL be castigated severely. Only fill up the corners; usually it only takes one pixel, but if the line is very steep or flat, you could use more. Here's that same line with magic applied:



Then, if you want to make it completely smooth, you can anti-alias the other side! It follows the same rules, too! While you're at it, you can also cap the ends of a loose line to make it look really sharp. It's pretty awesome, in my opinion:



Now, notice the problem we've run into here. While we were trying to make it look smooth, we ended up hopskipping some ugly little bumps into it. How do we get rid of them? Well, we're going to sacrifice... OUR LINE. *gasp* Just make that one little bumpy part of the line into the color of the anti-alias, and it'll go right away. See?



heck yeah. That's the basics of anti-aliasing. If you feel really radical, you can anti-alias with ANOTHER COLOR and make it look even more slick:



whoaaaaa! Now that we've learned to do this to lines, just imagine the quickly-whipped-up possibilities:


...


It's very nice! So fulla spice! See how Commander has changed? He looks like he belongs in a showcase!

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This post has been edited by Bacteriophage on Oct 13 2007, 10:23 PM

this stuff should all be in one post (or have a table of contents with links) for ease of use

Sexy lineart is sexy. Interesting tutorial. It was fun to read too! =D

ah, yes. you are doing the same thing they do on M and L

This post has been edited by Fonki Bot on Oct 13 2007, 10:46 PM

You know what, I'm going to create a tutorial on hue shifting.

there is so much to hue shifting that it can't be put into one tutorial

Hey, I might actually use this!

Awesome topic! this is totally rad %D
Thankyou so much for making this Medri ^^ now we should see lotsa new exciting sprites! <3

Thank you for making this. It could help.

Also colour replacement tool by right-clicking with the eraser.

Incredibly useful, yet barely anyone notices it.

Someone whos good at animatios should post some tips here.

And at spriting hands.

simple step by step shading tutorial

coming up after motion blur...
animation
and effects

My main problem is walk cycles, anyone really good at em?

I so need the motion blur one.